Structural Design & Energy Balance Conceptualization for PV Based Protective Environment Controlled Farming

Protective environment-controlled farming is a good alternative of conventional or open land farming as it reduces farmer's dependencies on external atmospheric conditions and allows to grow the crop as per their choice. However, for farmers living in remote/isolated regions availability of electricity is a major concern in order to implement such protective environment-controlled farming systems in absence/non-connectivity with the National grid. Further, it becomes more difficult for the farmers with farms in hilly regions. To address these issues, in this paper structural design and energy balance conceptualization of a photovoltaic (PV) energy based protective environment-controlled farming system is presented. The proposed PV based protective environment-controlled farming (PV_PECF) system have added advantages like it is movable/transportable and thus is suitable for hilly regions too. Further, it has PV as a source of energy for its operational power demands and thus no dependency on utility grid. The scope of this paper is limited towards design and conceptualization of energy in PV-PECF system. Further, other operational aspects and obtainable results would be presented as a part of future work.